The sizzle seems to be gone from America's long-term relationship with the potato. Consumers are eating fewer of them, especially the kind that's not fried in a vat of hot oil. But what if a new and different potato arrived in town? A stylish one, with colorful flesh that was good for you, too?
Get ready. It's happening, in part, thanks to Chuck Brown, a geneticist who works for the USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Prosser, Wash. Brown's job involves poking around in odd corners of the potato gene pool. His goal used to be finding genes to make potatoes less vulnerable to insects, or disease. He didn't think much about changing the good old reliable potato itself — until one day in the early 1990s.
"I was walking through the field on harvest day," Brown recalls, "and the glint — the sunlight glinting off some of the tubers — kind of caught my interest. And I went over there with my knife and started cutting them. And I found some that had orange flesh."
Brown wasn't completely surprised. He'd once worked in Peru — the potato's ancestral homeland — and he'd seen all kinds of strange-looking potatoes there: long, thin ones; potatoes with sunken eyes; blue and yellow ones.
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